As known in the prior art, television content is provided to home and businesses by local broadcast providers and network content providers. Local broadcast providers can deliver programming over the air (OTA) or through a local subscriber service, such as cable or satellite broadcasters. Many television networks, however, only provide programming content through local subscriber services.
National and regional network providers distribute their programming and commercial content through network feeds to the local broadcast providers and local subscriber services. The network feeds therefore provide the earliest available source for the content. Local broadcast providers and local subscriber services may replace network commercial content with local commercial content and otherwise process the content, such as compressing digital data. As a consequence, there are lags between when content is available on the network feed and when the content is delivered to the user.
To view programming from a local subscriber service, a subscriber device (e.g. cable or satellite decoder box) must be installed at the user location and connected to a television input. The user typically selects a viewing channel using a remote control unit that communicates with the subscription device using an infrared signal protocol.
Often a user may have an interest in watching multiple programs that are broadcast at the same time. The user can time-shift by recording one program while watching another program. That solution may not meet the user's needs. Instead, while viewing one program, the user may wish to change channels and view another program. That is typically done by manually selecting another channel. The user will then view the other program until deciding to change channels again. Such channel surfing is fairly common among sports fans, who may be interested in multiple live games during any one time slot. To facilitate channel surfing, some televisions employ Picture-In-Picture (PIP) technology to tune to multiple channels and display the content from each channel on the television monitor.
Regardless of the reason, there are some predictable times during programming when a user may wish to change the channel. One instance is during a commercial break, during which the user may prefer to watch programming on another channel instead of the commercials on the current channel. Another instance is during broadcast of a commercial with content deemed unsuitable to the user.